Make your own t-shirts for events

The possibilities are endless. And so are the situations where it can be very useful and fun to make your own t-shirts. I've read a lot about people making t-shirts (or having them made) for family reunions. It's a terrific idea, and everyone gets to take home some memorabilia to mark the experience. Of course teams for sports and other hobbies will often have a use for team shirts, both for games and tournaments, but also for fund raising events or parties. Events like bachelor and bachelorette parties, pub crawls, university initiation parties and other momentous and debaucherous occasions can be made hilarious with the right shirts.

You can look at different ways of doing it yourself. If you're a screen printer already, that shouldn't be too hard. You could stencil, paint or draw of course. If you want them to look professionally done, and don't want to learn how to silk screen just yet, you can do it online by uploading photos or other image files to Spreadshirt, or some other t-shirt making website. Spreadshirt is my favorite, but there's a list of other good ones in the upper right hand column of my blog too. Otherwise, call some local printing shops in your area. You might get good rates if your numbers are high enough.

How to make your own t-shirts with unique style

Here I am as always, dedicated to showing you ways to make your own t-shirts that are going to be totally different than what all the peeps in the streets are sporting. I randomly found an article online from a Pilipino newspaper a little while ago, and it totally inspired me. It's not that it's such a fascinating story really, but I liked the idea, and I think that a person could do a lot with it.

The article is about a fashion designer who had made it his mission to create clothing which distinctly represent his Pinoy culture and tradition without seeming overly formal, out of place or contrived. One method that he used to make the clothing more modern and natural and less feminine than the traditional embroidery was photo silk-screening. He could use traditional imagery, and modernize it with his means of production.

Anyway, it just made me think of the endless possibilities for beautiful traditional emblems or symbols from different cultures which could be stylized or adapted and printed on shirts or whatever else. Depending on the design, it could look great as a repeat pattern, or simply one stand-alone image.

Places you could look to for inspiration…of course the internet’s always great. Also the library or book store will probably have books about textiles, or Latin, Indian, Polynesian, Caribbean or African culture, and you can probably find shapes that you could photocopy or recreate somehow in your own way.

And how about a museum? If you live in a big enough city, you might even be lucky enough to have a textile museum at your disposal. Those places are wells of ideas, seriously. But any museum with cultural exhibits might have hand-woven, or painted or printed cloth from Asia, Africa, Latin America or elsewhere that just might tickle your fancy and get your creative juices flowing. After my last trip to the textile museum, all I wanted to do was massive repeat pattern printing and then make stuff out of the cloth, or even just hang it on my wall. They were showing an amazing exhibit featuring cloths made of bark in many developing countries around the world. The patterns were mostly abstract, very symmetrical and intensely beautiful.

Food for thought. There are so many ways to generate ideas that will help you make your own t-shirts that are original and fun. If you want to take that idea further, feel free to leave a comment. Of course, once you've chosen and image and made it yours, you can decide whether you want to print it yourself using one of the Do-It-Yourself methods I've written about on this blog, or send your design to Spreadshirt or one of the other online t-shirt makers.

The easiest way to make your own t-shirts

I promise that very soon we will get into some real crafty ways to do it yourself, but let's start out real simple and go for the number one easiest way to make your own t-shirts. That's right! Have someone else do it! There are a bunch of companies now that allow you to design your own T on the web and they'll print it and send it to you. I've been researching loads of these sites lately. Some of them will restrict you to text, or combinations of their own images. A few will let you upload your own images.

My favorite is Spreadshirt because it's really easy and you can literally do whatever you want to. The image you use can be a photograph, a drawing you've scanned into your computer, or a graphic you created with a graphics editor like Photoshop. Just make sure that you have the legal rights to print the image, especially if you plan to sell it (That's right, you can even sell it on Spreadshirt). Or just simple text. You can play around with fonts and sizes and placement of the words. Their prices are totally reasonable, and it varies with what you're going to put on your shirt. Text alone is the cheapest, and they'll charge a bit more for every line of text. An image is slightly more, and an image and text combined is a bit more still.

So if you have ideas to make your own t-shirts but don't have the time or the desire right now to get your hands dirty and learn how to do this at home, check out Spreadshirt and make your own t-shirts in minutes online.